


Never had it so good

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault, The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: 1960s, Acting, Aging, F/M, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 07:45:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2724329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hilary has a consultant post, Julian has a play in rehearsal at the RSC, and their fourteen-year-old son is finding his own path.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never had it so good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



> Note to readers: although this is a generally upbeat fic, the opening scene is set in a hospital and does include discussion of medical procedures, including treatment of the aftermath of an illegal abortion. The "London Women's" is not intended to depict any specific hospital.
> 
> Note to Antonia Forest fans: this story contains more than a cameo by Antonia Forest characters but is something less than a full crossover. I hope the tagging is not too misleading.
> 
> Thanks to my beta, Hadjie.

_1960_

Hilary impatiently shook her sandalwood cigarette box, then slid it open to make certain, but the results were no more satisfactory than they had been a moment earlier. It was still empty. She had bought two packets of cigarettes only the previous morning, on her way to rounds in the Gynae Ward as usual, moved perhaps by some premonition that she would need more help than usual to make it to the end of the week. It was now half past three on a Friday afternoon and she was faced with the fact that her calculations had been inadequate.

It was her firm's week for taking-in. Over the course of the day in theatre she had presided over a lengthy list, moving from a radical hysterectomy to a tubal ligation to a hymenotomy, and been called at the end of the latter to an emergency caesarean next door. In retrospect she found it difficult to believe that she had managed to finish the cigarettes in the hurried moments in between. But she must have done.

She surveyed a crowded ward: two women in labour, others recovering, the faint cries of babies from the nursery down the hall. There were beds queued outside, an unavoidable fact of life. In the septic ward down the hall her junior house surgeon - an irrepressible young woman named Lucy - had been run off her feet dealing with the aftereffects of failed and incomplete amateur abortions.

Thirteen years ago now Hilary had come to the London Women's in the wake of the war, a half-qualified surgeon whose marriage - and small son - made her virtually unemployable in her chosen field. Gynaecology was not the career to which she had aspired during her training days thirty years earlier. There were times when she silently cursed reproduction, the female anatomy, and everything associated with it. But the work and its demands were a blessing, and the need was obvious. Hilary would never have chosen voluntarily to work at a women's hospital; she knew that she never would have become a consultant without it.

The internal telephone was ringing off the hook. Hilary, on her dignity as an honorary, waited for Lucy to dash back from placing a cannula in order to answer it.

"Gynae Ward. Yes. Mmm. Well..."

From the way that Lucy's eyes darted quickly around the ward, Hilary could well guess what the question was.

"No," she said sharply, forestalling the inevitable demand. "We haven't the bed. We haven't even a trolley."

Lucy put her hand over the receiver. "Twenty-three. First trimester. Uterine haemorrhage. Had two pints in Casualty and it hasn't done any good."

Hilary thought and gave a quick nod.

"Send her up," said Lucy into the phone. "We'll make room." She rung off.

"Spontaneous?"

"I suppose it could be."

Hilary did not even know why she had asked.

"I was going to leave at five," she said. "I _am_ going to leave at five. But first we'll take her to theatre."

Once the patient was on the table she did not think of anything else. For over an hour she worked quickly and steadily to stop the bleeding, Lucy faithfully by her side. Uterine massage did little good; she proceeded to bilateral ligation of the arteries, thinking to avoid the radical choice of a hysterectomy for a woman so young. It was a procedure made sadly familiar by necessity, and in this case - relatively uncomplicated - it worked. After anxious moments of waiting the bleeding slowed and finally ceased.

Hilary breathed a sigh of relief, briefly permitting herself to indulge a justified pride in her background in general surgery - which was, after all, without substitute. She did not, today, have the time or energy to curse the laws that made her skill so invaluable; she had work to do.

It was twenty past five by the time that the patient, still being transfused, began to slowly recover consciousness in the ward. Hilary, waiting impatiently nearby, had returned to wishing for a cigarette.

"Right," she said to Lucy. "Yours from here."

Lucy gave her a rather panicked look. "But if she starts again...?"

Hilary had often asked herself why housemen never seemed to require the reassurances that female house officers seemed to expect as their right. In her own training days she had firmly repressed her own feelings of inadequacy, or at least disallowed herself from giving voice to them, out of a feeling that the job demanded no less. On the whole she thought she was far kinder to her juniors than her own chiefs had ever been. Even on a day like today.

"Then you'll treat her," she said. "And if you need help, you'll ask for it. If you can't cope there's the registrar on call. But that's down to your judgment. I'm going."

Lucy swallowed. "I'll cope. Enjoy your weekend, Mrs. Fleming."

"Good girl," said Hilary.

***

Hilary made her way out into the car park with the feeling of a schoolgirl at the end of term - as indeed it was, though not for her. Even in south London it was a beautiful June day; the bonnet of Julian's red 1959 MG, a nostalgic recent purchase recalling the car he had owned when they had first met, was dusted all over with pollen, which had been borne on the wind from heaven knew where. Hilary stood for a moment wondering up at the clear blue sky, for there was not a tree visible amidst all the sooty brickwork.

She got the car out of the space with a squeal of tyres and a grinding of gears. Dr. Sharma from Radiology, just arriving for the start of her shift, gave a smile and a wave which Hilary acknowledged reluctantly. She was not at all used to driving the MG; she had only taken it to work today at Julian's request because she would be driving to collect him afterwards.

Hilary had hoped to get out of London before the weekend traffic became too thick. In the event she did not even get across the river; stuck in a snarl at Victoria Bridge, between a London bus and a lorry, she drummed her fingers on the side of the car and wondered why on earth she had been so reluctant to delay for the five minutes it would have taken to pick up a packet of cigarettes. The traffic got worse every year. One hardly knew what difference a motorway would make but surely it would have to be something.

Perhaps it had been an ill-advised plan from the start. Oliver was coming to the end of his first year at Marchester; tomorrow would be Speech Day and both his parents were expected to be in attendance. Julian had been two weeks in Stratford-upon-Avon rehearsing his new production of _Richard II_. It was Julian, before his departure for Stratford, who had suggested the convenience of Hilary driving up on Friday night to collect him at the end of his rehearsal, followed by an overnight nearby and an early arrival at Oliver's school the following morning.

Hilary had expressed her doubts about the whole proposal when she had last spoken to Julian on the telephone.

"Well, I won't run late," Julian had replied airily. "So skerwash."

Hilary had laughed. "Darling, what on earth?"

"Oh. Sorry." He looked a little abashed. "Lawrie says that all the time. I must have picked it up."

Hilary had been hearing about Lawrie since the start of rehearsals but realised that she had never particularly listened. 

"He must be rather young," she said vaguely.

"She's twenty-two. Or is it twenty-three? Either way, yes, a child really."

 _Oh,_ thought Hilary, a faint electric fizzle of realisation tingling down to her fingertips. _She._

"Just left RADA," continued Julian, apparently warming to his theme. "She hasn't done much of anything yet; I might not have given her an audition at all if Ellen hadn't asked me to let her read, but she's been a bit of a protege of Ellen's for ages. Ellen was right, naturally; she's marvellous. I've been thinking already what I'd like to see her in next."

From Julian, whose professional judgment was in its way as carefully measured as Hilary's own, this was high praise indeed. To have earned the recommendation of Ellen Holroyd was higher praise yet.

While still at university Julian had dreamt of acting opposite Ellen Holroyd. Several years later he had admitted her name finally to Hilary, who - far from laughing - had taken some pleasure in the thought of imagining an undergraduate Julian thinking longingly of a woman whom even then had been past fifty. Hilary took even more comfort in it now, for at her last birthday she herself had turned fifty-six.

Though Julian himself at forty-five had lost the extreme, unsettling beauty of his early youth, it had been replaced with a confidence and poise that weighed far more. He had the undeniable looks of a leading man; one would not have thought him a day past forty, perhaps not much past thirty-five.

 _It was always going to happen eventually,_ thought Hilary gloomily. 

She was distracted from this line of thought by the traffic in Trafalgar Square - and thankfully, too. Once she had passed Euston she realised that she was being ridiculous, reminding herself of a twenty-year marriage that had endured despite all of her darkest forebodings. As exasperating as he might be at times, Julian had proven himself an adoring, devoted and - so far as she knew - entirely faithful husband. Hilary sometimes felt that it was more than she could have hoped. Perhaps it was her feeling of indebtedness that made her uneasy.

***

Once upon she would have said that Stratford-upon-Avon was familiar to her; as an undergraduate she had attended the old Memorial Theatre and, though her medical work left her less time for excursions, had learnt slowly to love the new theatre which had risen from its ashes. Now, though, Julian's career had brought her a different sort of intimacy with the town, one which she could never have anticipated when she had been only a faithful member of the audience.

As she drove across the bridge into town, she glanced to her left at the theatre by the river, whose red brick stood out against gathering dark clouds to the south. The roads were already crowded with tourists and trippers coming in for the evening's play - not Julian's, which would be in rehearsal for another week yet. Hilary took particular pleasure in passing by the main entrance, only to pull up and stop near the stage door.

The porter knew her by sight and nodded as she walked past. Then out of the door came Lucien, one of the indispensable fixers whom no production can be without, tying his yellow silk scarf around his neck.

"Hilary, darling," he exclaimed, grasping her shoulders and leaning in for a kiss with the exuberance that she had learned to expect from Julian's theatrical colleagues. "They're still rehearsing. Practically done, though. I'm almost sure of it."

Hilary presented both cheeks, and made the murmurs of acknowledgment and fondness that were all that seemed to be required on such an occasion, but inwardly her heart was sinking. 'Practically done' covered a multitude of sins in rehearsal - as it did, to be fair, in the operating theatre as well - and if it were true it would hardly be worth saying.

She entered the rehearsal room to find _Richard II_ still in progress. Julian was engaged in a lengthy explanation, pacing back and forth with the occasional expressive gesture, whilst three women hung upon his every word. His movements had a distinguished grace sufficient to catch the eye of even the most casual observer - and Hilary was a connoisseur of long standing.

 _A stage-door devotee,_ she thought wryly.

The Duchess of Gloucester looked up from a chair near the door. "Hilary. They're running over."

Hilary sat down beside Ellen Holroyd. "I can see that," she said quietly, not wanting to disturb the actors. "And here I was prepared to apologise for being late. But how are you, Ellen?"

"Rather well, thank you. Good to be in harness again. And to see Lawrie in a professional role at last. He's just running her through her paces once more."

Hilary looked up and realised it was obvious which of the three women was the Queen, and which her handmaidens. Lawrie - for it must be her - was no older than her fellow actresses, a slim blonde barely out of her teens who wore a black turtleneck, a strikingly short skirt, and more smudged black eyeliner than Julian had ever yet evidenced in a production. An indefinable quality picked her out from her fellow actresses, as though she had expanded slightly at the arrival of an audience, however small. Hilary was shocked and disappointed to discover that she despised the girl on sight.

"Mm," she said, noncommittally.

"She was at Kingscote," Ellen added. "Another old girl."

Hilary cast about for something else to say to Ellen. Having been at first a mentor to Julian, and later a colleague and friend, Ellen had been for many years a regular visitor to the Fleming house, along with her secretary-companion Meg. But though she had always been friendly enough to Hilary they had, after all, not so much in common besides Julian. And Hilary did not think she could bear to discuss Lawrie Marlow at the moment, even if they had been to the same school.

"Right," Julian was saying. "Could we have the scene once more, if you please? And Lawrie, if you'll remember to..."

"I think I'll just go for a walk," said Hilary, hoping to escape before they started up again. "My legs are still rather cramped from the car. If Julian asks, tell him I shall be back in fifteen minutes."

" _What sport shall we devise here in this garden/To drive away the heavy thought of care?_ "

With Shakespearean blank verse ringing in her ears, Hilary fled the rehearsal room. She thought first of the theatre bar, hoping to buy a packet of cigarettes and perhaps even a small drink. Though this was not her usual habit, a long day in theatre had left her with an aching back and neck that the car journey had only exacerbated. In default of two panadol - which she had also forgot to stock up on - she thought that she might prescribe herself a gin and tonic instead.

When she got to the bar, however, she found it still closed. A factotum was bustling back and forth with various pieces of glassware but he hardly seemed to notice her.

"All I want is a packet of fags," she said, raising her voice slightly to catch his attention. "I've had rather a difficult day."

"Haven't we all, love," came the distracted reply. "Come back in half an hour."

 _He would have made an exception for Julian,_ thought Hilary crossly, not considering that she had made the request in a tone which she would have used to demand an instrument of a lagging theatre sister. _He would certainly have made an exception for that Lawrie Marlow._

Feeling distinctly hard done by, she drifted instead into the ladies' toilets, thinking that at least she could occupy herself with touching up her makeup. When she glanced into the mirror - which was lit with a wattage more appropriate to a dressing room - she wondered instead whether she had even remembered to put any on that morning. When Julian was home, if he was awake when she left for the hospital, he very often did the job for her, being both more skilled with makeup and rather fond of applying it even off the stage. When he was away, her own efforts were far more cursory, as there hardly seemed much point in it; she saw the point now.

Stepping back from the sink mirror and turning to examine herself at full length, Hilary disappointedly supposed that one could not ask so much of fifty-six. Her hennaed hair was subtle rather than brassy, and in preparation for the weekend it had been set only the day before, so it had suffered less than usual from the necessary surgical cap. Her tweeds were suitably tailored, since she still insisted on having them made to measure (an anachronism these days, one suspected). Her figure was decently good for her age, if not quite what it had once been - and this, she thought regretfully, if not quite resentfully, because she had chosen at the last to bear Julian a child.

All of this one might acknowledge, and yet it added up to the fact that she looked... her age. Matronly, one might even say, if one chose to be cuttingly accurate. Over the years her face, whose skin had always been delicate, had acquired graven lines expressing, variously, amusement, decision, and fatigue. On a day like today it seemed mostly the latter. 

Hilary could scarcely believe that twenty years ago she had considered herself middle-aged; now she would have given anything to be in her middle thirties. But there was nothing to be done apart from her makeup - so this, accompanied by the mental shrug with which she made a habit of dismissing the un-mendable, was exactly what she did.

By the time that she returned the rehearsal was over, but Julian seemed no closer to leaving. He was surrounded by various hangers-on, well-wishers and hopefuls, all having waited to have their word with the great man - for such he now was, though Hilary sometimes had difficulty in crediting it. Standing ignored at the edge of the circle, she remembered a time when her congratulations had been the only ones he could hope to receive at the end of a production. How very long ago it seemed now.

Briefly she contemplated simply driving onwards to the hotel and leaving Julian to make his own way. But she was forestalled when Julian glanced towards her. From the illumination that crept across his face, she could tell that he had not noticed her presence before.

"Hello, darling," he said.

"You're later than late," she replied, but she could feel herself already softening at the sight of him. "I don't suppose you have a cigarette?"

He explored his pockets briefly and let his expression of winsome apology do double duty. "I haven't I'm afraid. But I think Lawrie has, haven't you Lawrie...?"

If Hilary's nicotine craving had been any less urgent, she might have taken the time to be hurt that Julian had advanced to begging cigarettes from another woman. As it was she accepted, without comment, the single Pall Mall that Lawrie, with a notable lack of grace, offered her.

"But Julian," Lawrie began, "do you _really_ think I was better than last time? Don't you think that I ought to be a bit more..."

"You can consider it over the weekend," said Hilary briskly. "Come along, Julian; we're going."

Taking him firmly by the elbow - one would almost rather it had been the ear - she drew him from the room. Behind them she could hear a voice raised in complaint. Unquestionably it was Lawrie Marlow.

"It's _not fair_. She took my last fag! That _old cow..._ "

***

"Oh, Hilary, Hilary, I've missed you so," murmured Julian, throwing himself into her arms.

In the end they had arrived at the country hotel too late for a hot dinner, and been forced to settle for a plate of sandwiches sent up to the room. Upon arrival the sandwiches had proven to be predictably uninspiring, not enough to distract Julian from his desire to satisfy a hunger of longer standing.

"It was only two weeks."

"An eternity," he declared. 

Hilary remained amazed at his dexterity. With his face buried against her neck he was nonetheless managing, blindly and successfully, to open with one hand the mother-of-pearl buttons of her blouse. She attempted to remind herself that she was cross with him.

"You haven't exactly been alone in Stratford."

"No." He kissed his way down to meet her collarbone. "It's been wonderful directing Ellen, though I can't get over feeling it ought to be the other way round. She suffers me somehow. My dearest, what makes you smell so lovely?"

"I only drench myself in perfume to keep from smelling like surgical disinfectant all evening."

"I like the disinfectant too. It's always terribly embarrassing when I go to collect you at the hospital."

Hilary grasped both his wrists and held them away from her body. "I didn't mean Ellen, you know; I meant Lawrie Marlow."

Julian, who had just gone down onto one knee on the carpet, glanced up at her. "You're cross with me, aren't you?"

 _Once upon a time,_ she thought with amusement, _he never would have managed to work it out._ She raised an eyebrow at him and wondered whether his streak of unusual perceptiveness would continue.

"You've been talking about her for weeks."

"I'm sorry if I've bored you but she really is very good. Ellen says the same and of course one trusts her judgment much more. I've been thinking of having Lawrie as Caliban in my _Tempest_. Do you think she'd answer or would it seem rather a stunt?"

Hilary gave him a disapproving look. "Darling, you're rather missing the point."

This time the hint struck home.

"But how extraordinary," exclaimed Julian, getting to his feet again with a slight wince that did not escape Hilary. "Lawrie? She hasn't the slightest - I mean, she's been running after the girl who's playing Desdemona in the other production. She wouldn't be interested in me for a moment."

His tone of amazement seemed, as always, entirely genuine; Julian still preferred, when he could, to forget the effects of his beauty. And yet Hilary could hardly ignore it. There were only too many young actresses - and actors, for that matter - who would be happy to sleep with Julian Fleming whether or not he held the power of life or death over their career.

"She's very pretty," she said, thinking that she herself would not have been entirely unconscious of Lawrie Marlow's charms if she had been a young house surgeon hanging on her every word.

"Oh, it's all makeup," he said dismissively. "I'm not letting her have a bit of eyeliner for the production; I'm sure she won't speak to me for days."

He paused. "But I don't know why you still think these things, Hilary."

Hilary felt abruptly irrational, which in turn made her feel even more cross. "I'm sorry," she said, aware that she still was being short with him. Apologies were the only thing that she hated more. "Because I'm ancient and appallingly temperamental. And my back is aching like hell and I had to drive all the way here without a single cigarette."

Although all this was true, she knew that the real reason was that she had missed him far more than she had realised, or would ever have admitted to herself. After more than twenty years the strength of her attachment to Julian still took her by surprise; it had only deepened with the passage of time, as she had once feared that it would. Then she had felt herself his only ally. Now he was loved by the world; though she was glad for him, she still thought longingly of those days when he had belonged to her alone.

"There's no one but you." Julian got back onto his knees. Another wince; Hilary wondered whether he had been fencing today and thought she must remember to ask him - later. "I knew from the first moment I heard your voice. There never could be. I've always said so. I'm sorry I was late. Will you let me make it up to you?"

His cheek was pressed close against her belly, his forehead against her breasts. (Rather more ample than they had once been; she had heard no complaints from Julian.)

She sighed and stroked his hair. "You already are, dearest. But could we lie down first?"

***

"Do promise me," said Oliver Fleming, leading his mother across the lawn towards the cricket pitch, "that you and Daddy won't do anything terribly embarrassing while you're here."

He was a Marchester boy, just as his father had been before him. At fourteen, nearing the end of his first year, he was slender and leggy in his flannels, taller than Hilary already - as, she was sure, he had not been during the Easter holidays. He combined Julian's careless beauty with her own lighter colouring, reddish hair burnished by the June sun. He had the Mansell nose, and in certain lights he reminded her of Sam, yet at other times she could not imagine how Sam and Julian could possibly be blended into one boy.

"Would we, darling?" asked Hilary, attempting to hide a smile lest this too be construed as embarrassing.

"Well, I don't _know_ ," he said judiciously. "But, for example, I hope that you won't discuss hysterectomies."

Hilary thought now that she could be mildly hurt. "I wouldn't do that."

"You did at the Easter hols."

"Yes... but in my defence I thought that your friend was still upstairs. And you did ask whether I'd been doing anything interesting recently."

"Anyway," said Oliver, "maybe just don't talk shop."

Biting her lip once again, Hilary restrained from defending herself by mentioning the disquisition on _Look Back in Anger_ to which Julian had subjected Oliver's schoolfriend later that evening.

"That goes for Daddy as well," Oliver added.

"When your Uncle Sam was at school, I was still studying for my Boards, and I used to go down to see him at least once a term. He never once complained that I embarrassed him, and he used to say that he lived for my cream teas."

Oliver treated this hoary and often-repeated anecdote with the inattention it deserved; he raised a hand in an almost imperceptible gesture of acknowledgement to a schoolfriend who was strolling with his own parents. The father was a stout and rubicund gentleman in clericals, probably a Bishop, and certainly older than Hilary; the mother was young enough that one hoped she was a second wife.

Hilary was briefly assailed by the thought that an aunt of twenty-three and a mother of fifty-six were not the same thing at all, but pushed this aside, along with the undeniable fact that at the time she had allowed Sam to smoke her cigarettes and occasionally have a glass of champagne.

"I don't intend to do a thing," she concluded, "apart from watch your father in the cricket. If there's nothing else you want to show us after that, we'll go back to the hotel."

Now that she was feeling a bit more vital, watching the Fathers v. Sons match seemed a pleasant enough way to spend the afternoon - and having an evening with Julian alone afterwards an even greater privilege. During the school chapel service that morning her mind had wandered considerably, to the extent of developing elaborate plans as to how she would direct procedings. She felt only mildly guilty about this.

"There's a play as well, this evening." Oliver sounded as though he were admitting to an imminent expulsion. " _Henry IV, Part II_. I'm in it, actually."

"My dear, why didn't you tell us?"

"I didn't want Daddy to fuss. You needn't come, anyway. I only have the tiniest part."

"But _naturally_ we'll come," said Hilary, seeing her evening slipping away.

Oliver appeared to take this as a matter of course. Having brought her to the edge of the cricket pitch, he spread out in a gentlemanly fashion the picnic blanket that he had been carrying, deposited their hamper on it, and waited while Hilary seated herself.

"Will you be all right here?" he asked solicitously. 

"What do you mean?" Hilary squinted up into the sun at her young son. "Aren't you staying for the cricket?"

"I thought I might just go and watch with my friends, if you don't mind terribly."

"Darling, of course I'll be fine! I don't need handholding. I shall be perfectly happy."

Hilary wondered how he thought she had coped without him all these years. She waved gaily at him as he walked away, as he turned to offer her one final, doubtful glance.

She spent the match smoking happily and steadily, eating the nibbles that had mostly been meant for Oliver, and admiring Julian in his cricket whites as he made a respectable showing for the fathers of Marchester.

It was almost, if not quite, enough to stop Hilary wondering why it was so much easier being an aunt than being a mother. She knew very well that she had never been up to her own mother's standards of maternity, either in terms of quantity or dedication. At forty-two she had given birth - rather heroically, she had thought at the time - to a single son, and then with relief left most of the mundane trials of infancy to his nurse. Though she had been at Oliver's side through every illness, she had likewise delegated the bedtime stories and the toy trains to Julian, who had embraced such childish things with enthusiasm, and whose acting engagements had been, in the early years after the war, inevitably spasmodic. Yet she had always assumed that when Oliver was older, she would come into her own as a purveyor of auntly cream teas and impartial, un-shockable advice.

What she could not make out now was whether she was simply too elderly for her post-war son, or whether he, paradoxically, was too elderly for a mother who had been young in the 'twenties. Oliver combined a good dose of Sam's lawyerly stodginess with a marked aversion to social embarrassment that reminded her of no one so much as his grandmother, Elaine Fleming.

It had been more difficult for him at Marchester than either she or Julian had expected. It was not Eton or Harrow but it was a first-rate school, and, amongst the sons of the British aristocracy, Oliver had been distinctly conscious of having a mother who worked for her living and a father who, despite his respectable birth to the landed gentry, had once trod the boards of provincial rep.

Hilary could not help but notice the discreet glances of recognition that followed Julian around the school - and, at the moment, the cricket pitch. Most of their fellow parents were probably more familiar with his turns at Stratford-upon-Avon or the Old Vic - and nowadays he mostly directed, in any case - but during the previous decade, conscious of impending school fees, he had taken a handful of roles at Shepperton and Elstree. Mostly they had been character parts but once or twice familial responsibilities had induced him to take a step that Hilary had never expected, and play the leading man.

He looked very much the leading man as he approached her now, at the end of the match, his jumper thrown casually over his shoulders.

"You were wonderful, darling," she said, getting to her feet and taking his hand for a moment.

"I'm sorry I took so long. Maddox, the headmaster, pulled me aside for a chat as I was coming out of the pavilion."

Hilary replied more sharply than she had intended. "What about?" 

"He wanted to know whether I would open their new theatre wing next year - I said yes. Probably I shouldn't, I regretted it straightaway, but I was so relieved that he hadn't asked me to pay for the thing."

"Oh, is that all?"

"Why, what did you think?"

"I can't imagine," said Hilary vaguely. 

Only she could, and had, before she was able to stop herself. She could not think why, except the memory of one afternoon long ago when Sam, a bewildered fifteen-year-old schoolboy, had confessed more than he intended to his young aunt. But surely that was not reason enough.

"Where's Oliver?" asked Julian.

"Off with his friends. One can hardly blame him for not wanting to watch a cricket match with his elderly mother." She paused. "When you were a boy, were you ever afraid that your mother would embarrass you when she came to see you at school?"

This was delicate; they occasionally discussed his mother now, but it was not a question that Hilary raised lightly.

Julian looked shocked. "Heavens no. I was always terrified that I would embarrass _her_. Rather a disgrace to the name, you know."

"I would never have dreamt of saying something like that to my father. He would have thought it impertinent beyond belief. But then when we had Oliver I promised myself that I would never come over all Victorian with him; it's a different era, isn't it?"

"Do you want me to... say something to him?"

The suggestion could not have been made with less enthusiasm. Julian had never been a convincing disciplinarian. Oliver had only ever intermittently been smacked, and not at all once he was past infant school; each of them had wanted the other to do it. By the standards of their own parents Oliver had been allowed to run wild. Hilary wondered whether this was the inevitable result.

"No," she said. "It would only make things worse. It's the age, I daresay. He'll grow out of it."

She lit another cigarette to disguise the miserable half-hunch of her shoulders. _Do you think that I've been a bad mother?_ she wanted to say. _Maybe it's my own fault for having been away so much. I always thought that we'd understand one another when he got older. I hoped he would love me more._

Across the field in the distance she could see Oliver, standing and laughing with a group of friends under a large oak. It was difficult now to believe that he had once been the little boy who had begged her never to leave him. There was so much of Julian in her son; it gave the rejection a particular sting into which Hilary dared not enquire too deeply. She thought only of Julian's pitiful desperation for his own mother's approval, and told herself that perhaps it was better this way.

***

 _Henry IV_. How fitting and how cruel.

When she told him about the play Julian had received the news in silence. Now he sat beside her in the old school theatre - which seemed to her perfectly well-equipped, certainly a good bit larger than the assembly hall that had served Kingscote for all purposes in her day - in an attitude of fixed, rigid attention, although it was more than ten minutes until the curtain was due to rise. He looked as though he were preparing himself for the firing squad.

She still kept, in an obscure pocket of her handbag, the snapshot of a sixteen-year-old Julian in _Henry IV_ that he had attempted to discard in her sitting-room fire all those years before. It was so imprinted upon her memory that there was no need to look at it; nonetheless she had done so, taking a surreptitious glance in the ladies' cloakroom as if to remind herself of what was at stake.

"It's completely different, darling," she said in an undertone, nudging Julian's knee with the edge of her hand. "Just think, every cell in your body has been replaced four times over..."

After the discovery of DNA this reassurance had rung increasingly hollow, but she had liked the image too much to give it up.

"I'd rather not talk about it right now," Julian said. "Or think about my cells. If it's all the same to you."

Hilary, smarting at this unaccustomed rebuke, took her hand away. She bowed her head to a serious study of the black print of the programme - and in particular the line, rather near the bottom, which read _Third Groom ... O. A. Fleming_.

How could she help but think of the strange alchemy of birth that in Oliver's body had mingled her own blood with Julian's seed - and begotten Julian, in turn, through the mysterious union of Elaine Fleming with his absent father? How surprising that any of them were the same from one moment to the next, given the conflicting pulls of race memory and atavistic instinct that ran within them all. None of them could ever really be free of the past; they could only rehearse it, different actors cast in the same parts. She knew that now.

When the lights went down, Hilary took Julian's hand in the darkness. This time he made no objection. Throughout the performance she held it close by her side.

Oliver did not come onstage until the final act, outside Westminster Abbey. Playing one of three grooms, he stepped forward and delivered, with an aching and wooden self-consciousness, his sole line: "Twill be two o'clock ere they come from the coronation: dispatch, dispatch."

Hilary leaned towards Julian, sympathy battling with her amusement. "He's terrible," she whispered, "isn't he?"

"One oughtn't to think that." He paused. "Yes. Remarkably."

Together they watched the three grooms exit, and listened to the new king pronouncing "I know thee not, old man."

She glanced over at Julian. His face was half in shadow, lit by the reflected stage lights, but this only highlighted its still-emphatic contours, the nobility of his profile. And suddenly there were tears running down his face. For a moment she seemed to be back in the Lynchwick Village Hall, and the figure beside her not that of Julian, but his mother. 

She wondered now what Elaine Fleming had been thinking, whether of her son or of his long-absent father. She supposed she would never know. Reaching up, she quickly wiped the tears from Julian's cheek before the curtain fell.

They said nothing to one another as they collected their things and got up to go. In the midst of a flood of other parents there was very little that could be said. Hilary kept close by Julian's side, her arm tucked in his, and led him out into the June evening. Together they walked around a corner of the brick building, where an arbutus hedge offered them some shelter from the dispersing audience.

"Thank you," he said, taking her hands. "I'm sorry. You're too good to me."

Hilary kissed him. "Never."

"Only it ought not to matter by now, ought it? What's done is done. You were right; it hasn't killed her. I was only making excuses for myself. And yet I still feel it..."

He drew a shaky breath.

"I think you always will," said Hilary. "After all, one can't stop oneself feeling."

It was a lesson that she herself had learned with difficulty. 

Julian shook his head convulsively, then leaned against her. She could feel the rapid beat of his heart gradually slowing with the reassurance of physical contact. There was nothing she could say; perhaps there was nothing she needed to say. It was Julian who, after some time, pulled away first.

"We should go to meet him," he said. "We should be there when he comes outside."

While the other parents drifted away, they waited together by the stage door. Oliver did not keep them waiting so long. He emerged in his school uniform once again, his hands buried in his pockets in a gesture very familiar to Hilary.

"Oh, hullo. I said you didn't have to come."

"Darling," said Hilary, "we wouldn't have missed it for the world."

"But it was rather a waste, wasn't it? Once I get my School Cert. I shan't darken the door of a theatre again."

"Not if you don't want to, of course," said Julian, with a hopeful earnestness testifying in equal parts to his own acting ability and to the love that he bore for his son. "But perhaps you'll feel differently by then."

Hilary lit a cigarette to conceal her smile.

"Honestly I'm sick of it," Oliver continued. "I'll never make an actor, I know it; I can't seem to manage to be anyone other than me. It's pretty poor, isn't it? I never said I could, but I've been getting stick from the other boys for weeks anyway, my _pater_ being Julian Fleming and all."

Julian looked stricken. "My dear old monkey-face," he said, using an old babyhood nickname that one had assumed put away along with Oliver's soft toys. "My dear old thing."

He reached out to ruffle his son's hair but Oliver ducked away.

"Please, daddy, not here," he said apologetically. "Sorry."

"I'm the one who ought to say sorry. One knows it hasn't been easy, having - well, having an actor for a father. But I don't suppose I can help it."

"Of course not. I didn't want to disappoint you, that's all. But," he added hopefully, "when you think about it, one could hardly be an actor and a doctor as well."

"You needn't be either, my sweet," said Hilary.

Admittedly she had sat through the prize-giving earlier in the day waiting with some anxiety to see if her son would be favoured in either biology or chemistry; but as he had not, she felt fairly easy in saying this. Oliver gave her a doubtful look in reply.

"Oh, _mummy_. You almost sounded as if you meant it."

"But I did mean it!" 

Hilary looked towards Julian, appealing for support. He said nothing.

"Shall we go down to the river?" said Oliver. "It's nice this time of night. We can look at the sunset."

It was chastening to realise that one's fourteen-year-old son possessed more social address than oneself. Hilary thought she detected the influence of Elaine Fleming, who had embraced her only grandchild with all the enthusiasm that she had denied her daughter-in-law... and her own son. Nowadays she acknowledged Hilary's existence; it was all that one could ask. But Oliver she adored - and it was his birth, seemingly, that had helped to make Hilary tolerable. At his own request Oliver had spent the past two summers at Larch Hill and would probably do the same this year.

Oliver lingered by Hilary's side as they strolled towards the river's edge. 

"I invited grandmother to come to Speech Day," he said in an undertone.

Hilary was blindsided by this. "Did you? When?"

"She came a fortnight ago to take me out to tea."

"You never mentioned that."

Oliver shrugged. Hilary wondered how long these clandestine meetings had been going on and concluded that it was perhaps better not to know. 

"But she didn't come today," she prompted.

Since Oliver's birth they had spent holidays together, a fragile _détente_ mediated by the calming presence of Sam and James, and occasionally Lisa and Rupert's daughter. Hilary could not imagine Elaine going to such lengths simply to avoid her son and daughter-in-law, not without further cause.

"Well," said Oliver, "I said about the play."

"Ah."

"I didn't even ask her to go to that, I know she doesn't like the theatre. But she said how she supposed I was taking after my father after all, and _his inexplicable fondness for making a spectacle of himself_." Though Oliver said he would never make an actor, this last phrase was delivered with a good measure of Elaine's cut-glass intonation. "I said that I didn't even want to be in the play, and would she rather I took after you instead, and then _she_ said that if I had been her son she would have brought me up better than to answer back like that." He paused. "I said I was sorry, but I don't think she forgave me."

"Oh, darling," said Hilary, shocked into speechlessness. "Oh, _darling_."

She looked around to see if Julian had overheard but he was walking some distance away, lost in his own thoughts and in the sunset that had begun to unfold over the hills to the west. It made no difference to her savage indignation. Once upon a time she had thought of Julian, _if he were my son_. Now that she had a son of her own, the memory made her squirm, for her feelings for him had been nothing like maternal. For Oliver, they were - and in his defence she would very happily have dissected Elaine Fleming without anaesthetic.

But it would have done no good to Oliver, whose loyalty to his grandmother deserved to be protected, however determined Elaine might have been to visit the sins of Julian's father upon the third generation. Even if she had been confident that she would be the victor, Hilary would not have made the attempt, for fear of tearing her son between them; she had seen what it had done to Julian.

"Your grandmother was a girl under Queen Victoria, after all," said Hilary, then immediately felt this had been too mild. "Not that it excuses her saying a thing like that to you."

"It was very funny," mused Oliver. "Not funny ha-ha but funny peculiar."

"Yes." One day he would have to know the whole story, but not today, and it was not her story to tell. "I'm sorry you had to hear that. It had nothing to do with you; I know that. You didn't deserve it."

"I didn't think I did."

Hilary reflected that this, after all, was the difference between a son and a grandson.

"But she does love you very much," she offered, hoping he never knew how much this olive branch had cost her. "And so do I."

Protected from the disdain of his school friends by the falling twilight, Oliver draped a casual arm across Hilary's shoulders, for all the world as if she were another boy. "I know. Thanks awfully, mummy."

Hilary blinked a little to clear her eyes and, for fear of embarrassing him, said nothing further.

Down at the edge of the river there were a few small trees sheltering the bank, with fields stretching away on the other side. They stood together for a few moments looking at the sunset before Julian came up to Hilary's side.

Oliver took his hand away from Hilary's shoulder and Julian, embracing her from behind, put his chin on it instead. "What's all this?" 

"Hello, my dear," said Hilary. "We were just talking."

Once again Oliver proved himself more collected than herself. "I was just wondering, daddy, what you were thinking of doing tomorrow."

Julian addressed himself to Hilary. "We were just going back straight after breakfast, weren't we?"

"Yes," said Hilary. "We thought we might stop in Oxford to take Hilary Clare to lunch at the Mitre."

Difficult though it was to believe, Lisa and Rupert's daughter was now finishing her first year at university, reading Geography. Not quite a proper degree, one felt - it had not been offered in Hilary's day - nor necessarily a prudent one in the wake of the 'winds of change,' with the pink bits on the map disappearing by the year. But there were limits to the influence of a godmother, however involved she had been in the life of her namesake, and therefore Hilary had confined herself to warm good wishes, the discreet presentation of a cheque intended to supplement the maintenance grant, and a brief and even more discreet recitation of contraceptive possibilities which Hilary Clare had received with an enigmatic, understated amusement that reminded Hilary painfully of Lisa.

"That sounds nice," said Oliver politely.

Hilary had an instinctive feeling, which one might even have called maternal. "Why do you ask?"

Her son picked up a rock and skipped it rather neatly down the stream. He had inherited Julian's physical talents, among other things. "Well, some of the other parents seem keen on breakfasting, that's all. But you'll probably want to start early."

"If you want to have breakfast with us," offered Julian, "you could just come round to the hotel."

Oliver shrugged. "I have the _exeat_ , so I suppose I might as well. Only... could we maybe go to the Royal instead? They're a bit better, I think."

"Have you been making a comparative study?" asked Hilary, charmed.

"Hilary Clare came up and took me last week. Didn't I write you about that? I meant to."

"You can tell us all about it at breakfast."


End file.
